TO BE CONCLUDED IN OUR NEXT NUMBER.
[BRITTANY: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS POEMS.][106]
THIRD ARTICLE.
In a former notice, we expressed an intention to present our readers with the translation of certain curious fragments relating to Merlin; to be followed by some of the historical poems which succeeded the Druidic compositions of earlier times. We proceed to fulfil our promise.
The name of Merlin (Myrrdhin, or Marzin) is so closely associated with the early mystic and mythological poetry of Cambria and Armorica that it will be desirable to give some account of this personage, as far as the uncertainty of his history renders it possible to do so, before reproducing any of the poems of which he is the subject.
It has long been supposed that there existed two Merlins, one of whom, a magician, was the offspring of a Christian virgin and a Roman consul who lived in the Vth century, in the reign of Ambrose Aurelian; or, according to the popular tradition, whose father was no mortal, but a malignant Duz, whom, under the form of a bird, she unwittingly let in at her window: and the other, a warrior and bard, who after the battle of Arderiz, in which he had unintentionally killed his nephew, lost his reason, and retired from the world.
But critics of the present day agree in considering that it is one person who is the subject of a triple tradition, and that it is the same Merlin who appears in the light of a mythological, historical, and legendary hero.
The fragments which still remain in Wales of the poems of this bard are either very much modernized or almost wholly transformed. Of the ballads relating to him which exist in Brittany, there seem to be four principal ones. First, a cradle-song, intensely pagan in spirit, in which his mother plaintively relates to him his mysterious origin while rocking him to sleep, and when, to her amazement, the infant derides her regrets, and defends his father, declaring himself to be born to be the good genius of the Breton nation. This poem it is needless to reproduce. We give translations of the remaining three, beginning with